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A great leader. What makes for a great leader? I went on the web to do some very in-depth and extensive research on the topic and here’s what I found. A website called Success.com had an article called “Everything You Need to Know to Become a Great Leader”. One section of the article listed ‘7 Qualities of an Effective Leader’. Certainly, a list of seven qualities of an effective leader in an article on everything you need to know to be a great leader from a place called Success.com should suffice in telling us what makes for a great leader. Please don’t mind if I drip with sarcasm.
Well, the first quality was “Be strong but not rude.” I guess that means be assertive, be direct, say what you expect from others, but do it politely. Be sure to say please and thank you. Second, “Be kind but not weak”. It seems they were saying that kindness is speaking the truth rather than dealing in delusion. Third, “Be bold but not a bully”. Seize the moment, take the risk, be inspiring; but don’t pressure people with bully tactics. Fourth, “Be humble but not timid”. Humility is to stand in awe of the inherent worth of others knowing you’ve a place among them too. Timidity fails to claim that place. Fifth, “Be thoughtful but not lazy”. Be thoughtful, have ideas, dream dreams, but get your boots on the ground and act on them. Sixth, “Be proud but not arrogant”. Be proud of your accomplishments, but don’t be haughty. Lastly, “Have humour without folly”. Have a sense of humour and be witty, but don’t be silly just to be liked.
This list was just one of a bazillion such lists you can find on the net. They all seem have to something in common in that they emphasize the qualities of character and the set of skills a great leader should have and/or try to develop. There’s also another school of thought out there that says great leaders are born not made and either you are or you aren’t. Still the emphasis is on the innate qualities of character and the skills possessed by a particular individual. A leader is an individual person whom others follow and leadership is what leaders do to lead the followers.
In my humble opinion, this highly individualistic way of thinking about leaders and leadership is one of the root causes of why our culture has such a problem with narcissists winding up in positions of power. It is also why most of the leadership advice out there can be summed up under the general rule of thumb: “Great leaders know best how to either curb or to utilize their narcissistic tendencies.” I am of the persuasion that leadership, like power, should always be a shared. Entrusting individuals (or acquiescing to them) with sole leadership
When I think about how leadership works in the church, I find that something else is at play. God is the true leader and God places people in positions of leadership among his people in order to speak and act through them so that God’s people will know that God is among them. In the church, whenever you got somebody rising to leadership on their own accord or talents or assertion or the people putting somebody in a place of leadership because they think he or she will make a good leader, you’re likely to have a problem. In the church God is the leader and church leadership reflects that.
Our text today is about how God began to make Joshua the leader of his people in the wake of Moses’s death. In verse 7 the LORD tells Joshua: “This day I will begin to exalt you in the eyes of all Israel so that they may know that I will be with you as I was with Moses.” “To exalt” means “to make great”. In the world of faith, it is the actions of God that make a leader great not their own. This means that as Joshua is now the leader of the Israelite people, God will make him great. Joshua’s authority to lead will come from the simple fact of the obviousness that God is with him and working through him. It is God’s promise to Joshua that he will act to let the people of Israel know that he is with Joshua as they enter Canaan just as he was with Moses as they wandered in the wilderness. God will make Joshua into a great leader just like Moses so that the people will know God is with them. In the world of faith, great leaders are, therefore, people whom God raises up to let his people know he is with them.
Before going further, we might want to ask how Moses was a great leader? A quick look at Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy show that Moses spent a lot of time in the presence of the LORD. God spoke through him. God acted through him. Moses got the elders of the tribes to judge disputes rather than do it himself. He mediated between God and the people. At some points in the story, Moses even displayed a more Godlike quality of character than God. After the Golden Calf incident Moses reminded God to act compassionately towards the people with whom God shared a deep bond of tender love.
Moses fell short once. There was the time when the people were again complaining of thirst there in the wilderness. God told Moses to go to a particular rock and speak to it. Instead, Moses broke out “the staff”, gathered the people around the rock, yelled at them, and then struck the rock with the staff to bring forth water. The incident made Moses look like he was doing things only God could do. He put himself in the place of God and that became the reason why God wouldn’t let him enter the Promised Land. Great leaders are in cahoots with God and do as God directs them. They don’t stand in the place of God and act of their own accord.
Looking at Joshua, as far as his only qualifications go, he was a good warrior whom Moses took to be his assistant. As such, he spent a lot of time watching Moses spend a lot of time in the Tabernacle talking to God. He was also one of the twelve spies that Moses sent into Canaan the first time they came to crossover into it. He and Caleb were the only two to give a favourable report. The other ten just scared the people and told them that there were giants in the land that they would not be able to defeat. So, Joshua had a heart for wanting to do what God wanted even if there seemed to be reasons to be afraid. Thus, he had the example of a prayerful mentor to follow and a desire to do what God wanted.
In our passage today, Joshua gets his first taste of what it is to lead God’s people. He simply has to do what God tells him to do. What did God tell him to do? Tell the priests who carry the Ark of the Covenant to carry it out into the middle of the Jordan and stand still. Oh, and let’s not forget that the Jordan was flooding at the time. It was likely mid-Spring and the snow on top of 9000ft high Mt. Hermon was melting flooding the Jordan Valley. The Jordan isn’t a very big river, but when it floods it rages. But to assure the priests, Joshua said that God said that as soon as the soles of the feet of the priests carrying the Ark of the LORD, the Lord of all earth, set foot in the Jordan, the waters upstream will begin to heap up and the people will be able to cross on dry ground.
This event is reminiscent of two prior events that we read about in the Bible. First, Creation itself, when God separated the primordial waters of to create a bubble in which to place his creation and when God separated the waters of the sea to create dry ground. To the ancient Israelites big bodies of water, whether in the form of a sea or a raging flood, were a symbol of chaos, of dark forces that only God could control and bring to order and out of them create something new.
It also sounds very much like the parting of the Red Sea. God parted the waters of the Red Sea so that first generation of Israelites could escape Pharaoh and his army. God parted the waters, walling them up on either side, and the Israelites crossed on dry ground. When Pharaoh’s army followed, God let the waters fall back on them and drowned them. That was the last act of God debasing the greatest power in the world at that time and its gods.
So back to the Jordan, Joshua’s first act of leadership was to get the spiritual leaders to lift high the symbol of God’s presence and boldly take the risk of stepping into the flooding waters of chaotic Jordan River and, then, to be just let God be God and God will do what God does – create something new.
There’s some wisdom here for church leaders. The hardest struggle for church leaders truly is just letting God be God. It can be so easy to let personal charisma win the day; or to manipulate religious symbols and conjure up the vibes of the good ole days to motivate people; or, and worst of all, to just plain bully people with guilt and fear into what you want them to do all the while believing it what God wants. In the church we have to let God be God and let God do what God would do rather than just striving for what we think makes for a successful church or a successful leader.
To try to apply this to us today, the decision for churches to resume worship services in their sanctuaries during COVID has great symbolic value even in a culture that’s not so Christian anymore. At least for the people of faith, gathering together in the presence of God to worship God is a profound reassurance that God is with us and all will be okay. I’m reminded of stories of congregations in Europe during WWII on both sides of the war continuing to worship in their bombed-out sanctuaries. Those acts of public worship sent a profound message to their communities that God was still present and would create something new.
The churches of our Cooperative have begun to worship together in our sanctuaries. There is the threat of the flood of a second wave of COVID. In light of that, the leadership of the Coop and of our individual churches have come to the conclusion that we need to stand on the dry ground of gathering for worship while we can and to do so responsibly; hence, the spaced out seating and the masks and the no singing and the shortened service time. We are gathering safely and we hope that it sends a message to our broader communities that God is still present and hasn’t forgotten them.
Throughout COVID there have been Christian communities who have rather brazenly put God to the test by disregarding safety protocols. There have been ministers who rather egotistically played the religious trump card of false faith by arrogantly preaching that God will miraculously protect his people so it’s safe to jump off cliffs. In so doing they have modelled a behaviour and an attitude that has done more to spread this pandemic than to curb it. In the end, they have only discredited God and made faith in God something to be mocked rather than the seedbed of salvation.
To wind this down, it is good to stand again on the dry ground of worshipping God together. Though the flood of chaos rages outside, we lift high the LORD of all the earth and together in Christ Jesus filled with the Holy Spirit we pray to our heavenly Father for the healing of his Creation and by this we try to tell our neighbours that God has not forgotten them. Amen.
